The Dark Side of Adolescence

My teenage years started off with a bang. I woke up on the morning of my thirteenth birthday and discovered I had started my first period. Fabulous... Cramps and Playtex weren't the worst presents I've ever received, but they're right up there. 

The next few years were absolute hell where hormones were concerned. My cramps were so bad that at one point during gym class, I was curled up on the dirty, dusty floor in agony, unable to move or get up. A teacher had to carry me to the nurse's office, where they called my mother to pick me up.

Thankfully, my mother (who was a nurse) understood, as she was cursed with the same life-crushing menses as I was. She made me an appointment with our OBGYN and got me on birth control so I could have some semblance of a normal life. This did help, but the wild mood swings—then incorrectly diagnosed as PMDD—was a different monster that would take almost two decades to resolve. 

An ability to read by age three that established expectations I could never live up to, a significant stutter in elementary school that took years of speech therapy to remedy and provided low-hanging fruit for bullies, and unrecognized autism that wasn't diagnosed until I was 30 all set the stage for an excruciating existence as a teen. 

I had horrific anxiety that caused massive panic attacks every damn day since I have memory. Doesn't everyone feel like dying multiple times a day for no particular reason? That's normal, right? 

*crickets*

It wasn't until a teacher in fifth grade sex-ed proceeded to list all of the symptoms I had struggled with since preschool and strongly recommended—in an ominous tone—that we should seek help from a guidance counselor if we identified with these signs of "stress," aka undiagnosed generalized anxiety disorder.

After a lengthy research binge in the library and a major ah-hah moment later, I finally understood what plagued me my whole life. Learning is fun. 

I had semi-confronted my paralyzing fear in the sixth grade after performing a scales test in band class and promptly throwing up my lunch after achieving my perfect score. The confrontation consisted of a long conversation with myself in the mirror locked away in my bedroom, where I told myself to knock it off and quit being a terrified little weirdo so I could make friends, order at restaurants, and have fewer moments of existential dread where I wouldn't devolve into a puddle with my heartbeat in my ears at the drop of a hat.

It worked, kind of. It would have to do because my parents didn't believe in psychological treatment for any of their children, and discussing such topics would quickly turn into a lecture about how I wasn't trying hard enough, blah blah, something about bootstraps, blah blah, uphill both ways, blah blah blah. 

Even after my epiphany, I still felt like a social outcast. Still, I was able to mirror well enough that I could float between many different cliques and appear normal-ish, but I never actually fit in anywhere. Each clique had a leader who inevitably discovered my weaknesses and used them to bully or embarrass me. 

For example, I cut my long hair short into a cute pixie style the summer before ninth grade. A guy who lived in my neighborhood who was higher in the social hierarchy than myself had honored me with the invitation to suck his dick one afternoon on the bus ride home. I managed to push the bile down my throat so I could squeak out a vehement "fuck no" while his friends all laughed and I quietly died inside. I didn't realize denying his grotesque advances would have life-altering consequences. 

The next day in environmental science class, he found his perfect moment for revenge when the teacher left the room to take a phone call. He stood on his chair and, with his full chest, called me a "dyke" in front of the entire class. I was mortified and dumbfounded, and pure rage was the only thing that kept me from crying. Being gay was used as a demeaning, nasty slur in those days, and to have my femininity and sexuality questioned publicly felt like a social execution. 

As an adult, I realize the jackass who insulted me was a butthurt, red-pilled little boy who chose to humiliate me in retaliation for wounding his fragile masculine feefees, and today, I would happily make out with the closest woman that would have me and simply dismiss him as another smooth-brained incel.

But back then, he made me feel ugly, embarrassed, insecure, and about an inch tall. That moment followed me throughout high school, and he never let me forget it. To this day, I have never forgiven him for how small he made me feel—and wouldn't, even if given the opportunity. 

I soon became hardened and cold, using my sassy retorts, dark humor, and cutting sarcasm as body armor against my bullies, thereby earning the charming title of "Ice Princess." I decided it was better to be quietly feared than generally liked, so I kept one close girlfriend through high school (plus a guy friend from middle school who became my boyfriend) and silently told everyone else to fuck off. 

I held on to that anger through my twenties and into my marriage before it was beaten out of me by my abusive ex-husband—along with every other emotion I was capable of. Bullies leave an impression that lasts far longer than they will ever realize. But that's a discussion for another post. 

My relationship with my parents back then was tumultuous at best, and I frequently felt isolated and emotionally abandoned as the self-sufficient middle kid (by necessity) with two chronically chaotic, coddled, and problematic brothers.

My mother was exhausted and manipulative, frequently using my father's volatile temper as a threat to compel good behavior. My father lived in a 1950s fever dream where he thought working and bringing home a paycheck was the extent of his parenting duties.

Anything good I did was rarely acknowledged because my parents were too preoccupied with my brothers' idiocy to notice. I'm still starved for validation, which occasionally haunts my current relationships.

As mentioned, I had a boyfriend throughout high school who started as my best friend in middle school. We were each other's first time for many teenage antics, and I loved him more than I had ever loved anyone or anything in my young life.

Unfortunately, I drew nourishment from his constant mental health crises and family drama, and our relationship was codependent and seriously unhealthy—although I didn't recognize this until many years later. 

As the senior year came to a close, my boyfriend had been accepted by a university up north, and I had opted to remain in North Carolina for college. We were realistic about the future of our romantic relationship and decided not to stress each other out with a long-distance entanglement. I was still under the naive belief that we would remain friends like we had always been, but he had other plans I was not privy to.

We agreed to meet, say our farewells to each other, and make love for the last time. But after he was an hour late, then two, and then three with no response to my frantic texts and voice-mails, I drove to his house only to find it dark and vacant. He had lied to me—for the first time in our six-year relationship—and secretly left for college halfway across the country the day before we were to say our final goodbyes.

He blocked me from every social media available back in 2005, and I had no way to ask what I did to deserve being abandoned this way. I spent the next several weeks confused and prone to fits of uncontrollable panic-fulled tears that were hot with rage and self-loathing. He denied me the small courtesy of closure I needed and my entire world was shattered.

Despite the decades and intimate relationships that have come and gone since then, that betrayal left a scar on my heart that has never healed.

I spent my first year in college suicidal, blind drunk, manic, screwing everything with a pulse, trying many of the drugs they warned us about in the DARE program, chain-smoking two packs a day, mutilating myself first with knives and then with numerous tattoos, piercings, and questionable hair colors and generally losing my mind. 

At the end of my rope and self-respect, I drowned my 19-year-old angst in Gentlemen Jack and Placebo lyrics, smelling of stale cigarettes and the cologne of the man who raped me whose dorm I was now leaving—a skinny, frail ghost that nobody noticed in the wee hours slowly and painfully walking across campus with soiled underwear and an unused condom in my purse. His choice of orifice would make pregnancy impossible, but it wouldn't save me from the cancer-causing virus he had infected me with. 

My teenage years were bookended with disappointment and blood. 

Elder millennials have had to traverse a wild world. Schools were forever changed after Columbine ushered in an era of mass shootings. I sat and watched both planes fly into the Twin Towers during freshman civics class. I joined Facebook the year after its inception and witnessed how the rise of social media irreparably corrupted our social interactions. I never stopped hearing about how much our boomer parents hated us—our avocado toast fueling their rage as they worked feverishly to dismantle and disintegrate the financial institutions, government programs, and freedoms they greatly benefitted from.

Everything moved too quickly for us to recover from the previous clusterfuck, and our generation now holds on to our creature comforts in an iron-death grip. 

Even if someone offered me 100 million dollars, a new Mustang Shelby Cobra, and a vacation home in Belize, I wouldn't return to my adolescence. The pain I felt then (and still feel today) has dulled with time, therapy, and a cocktail of delicately balanced medications, but it is always present. It caused a ripple effect that is still rocking my boat in my mid-thirties.

My biggest regret is not advocating harder for myself to get the mental health care I desperately needed in my teens. Perhaps if my autism, anxiety, and bipolar depression had been diagnosed earlier, I could have formed better coping mechanisms than the destructive and masochistic ones I developed on my own.

My teenage years made and broke me, but it was possible to repair some of the damage...

Some, but not all.